Before the advent of Google’s search algorithms, only web marketers and companies with deep pockets could hope to get top search engine rankings from floods of traffic to their sites. Nowadays, the playing field is leveled. To get your website at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages), you want to make sure you have a good chunk of one way inbound links from reputable and high ranked websites. There are four proven search engine optimization methods I highly recommend employing for your blog or website. Please note these methods require some minor research, a touch of patience, and some basic web knowledge.

1. Post on Free Blogs
You will receive one way linkbacks to your website every time you create a new post entry on popular free blogs. Make sure your free blog can ping the blog update services such as Technorati. Blogging is one of the easiest and most recommended methods to create valuable links back to your website. Web users can subscribe to your blog’s RSS feeds and get regular alerts from blog services whenever your blog has been updated. Also each RSS feed that is subscribed to counts as a free inbound link to your site. I discuss my top picks of free blogging services in another article I highly recommend you read. These blogs have rewarded me with fast and high valued inbound links time after time.

2. Post on Popular Forums
Registering on multiple free and popular forums is the second method I recommend for a great linkback campaign. It’s very important though to drop comments on forums whose topics are related or closely follow the same category, theme, and target audience as your website. It’s a good practice to include and link keywords in your comments that are found on your site. Remember to always choose forums that allow hyperlinks in your comments or more importantly in your profile signature. The next task is to make sure these hyperlinks do not employ the “rel=nofollow” rule. If this is the case, these forums are a complete waste of your search engine optimization efforts. Search engine robots such as Googlebot do not index these hyperlinks, resulting in no inbound links to your website. Check to see whether the forum is high trafficked and high ranked. The higher the traffic/rank of the forum, the more weight the inbound link holds by Google and Yahoo’s standards. Strong inbound links will push you further up in search engine results resulting in more traffic to your website.

3. Submit Original Articles to Article Banks
I can’t stress how important this method of Inbound Linking is. If you have the gift of writing then your website will benefit greatly by submitting your articles to article banks. As with any form of inbound linking, use only those article banks that are reputable, adhere to search engine optimization rules, and do not employ the “rel=nofollow” rule in their hyperlinks. The key is to write about topics that don’t expire or become stale. It’s a good rule of thumb to keep the articles around 300 to 700 words. Each article you submit will most likely have a signature line with an inbound link to your site, and each time someone uses that article they are required by article banks to keep your link in that signature section.

4. Submit content to Social Bookmarks
Social bookmarks are the new golden child of search engine marketing. They’re free and heavily used for content building on millions of websites. Most major portals utilize them to get their articles, videos, and images distributed to a broader reach of web users. A major advantage of social bookmarks is that once submitted, your articles get indexed by Search engines a lot faster than simply waiting for search spiders to crawl your site and index pages. Each submission creates a valuable inbound link. You can generally submit articles to about 14 high traffic social bookmarks, such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Mixx and so on.

Follow these methods and you will see an enormous turnaround in traffic and search engine rank in a short moment.

When we hear the word “Backlinks”, the first thing that comes to our mind is numbers. This site has 100 backlinks, so and so site has 1000 backlinks and so on. But now the numbers game is slowly dying, as building quality backlinks has become much more important than building too many links. Quality and relevant backlinks are two very important considerations in Search Engine Optimization. A backlink from a site that has quality content as well as content related to the theme of your website is much better than a backlink from a inadequately optimized or irrelevant website.

It is way better to get trusted backlinks. Finding sites that have “Real Backlinks” and getting your links on real pages is really cool and winning trust can be done. The only issue here is, it takes a long time to get your links on real pages e.g. the home page of relevant and high PR websites. But at the end of the day, it is worth getting these trusted links than just increasing the volume of links crazily from irrelevant and poorly optimized sites.

Quality backlinks are a must and numbers are not that important anymore. This is the reason why a site might rank high inspite of having a few backlinks.